When I served on the National Post’s editorial board, back in the paper’s glory days, we had arguments about what our editorial positions should be. The line often used to carry the day was, “we already have a Globe and Mail”. As in, there already was a newspaper with a politically correct, liberal, vanilla point of view. Wasn’t the Post supposed to be different?

It’s a question someone at the Post should have asked before publishing the extraordinary, 10,000-word attack on me called “Rebel Without Applause”.

Six pages long, including the entire front page. Reporter Richard Warnica worked on it for months, even calling up my schoolyard friends from when I was 14 years old, looking for dirt.

I’ve never seen anything like it. It was something I’d have expected from the CBC, the Globe or The Toronto Star, and reporters at those places gleefully promoted the story. National Post subscribers had a different response, though: every letter to the editor published in reply was disappointed, even baffled.

The reason the article elicited that reaction with Post readers is, “we already have a Globe and Mail”. Since when does the National Post demonize conservatives, using the language and the ideology of the left? And since when does the Post call people who are worried about terrorism and sharia law “Islamophobic”?

The article used the phrase “far-right” ten times and “extreme” thirteen times. “Islamophobia” was in there six times. That’s how the CBC talks about conservatives – not how a conservative newspaper does it.

The main quarrel the Post has with my website, The Rebel, is that we “have become a global platform for an extreme anti-Muslim ideology”, and our criticism of political Islam is a “far-right fringe theory”. The Post links me to “the Middle East Forum, a right-wing think tank with a long history of hostility toward Islam” and indulges in a conspiracy theory that we are secretly owned by foreign, anti-Muslim tycoons.

In fact, many of my views on Islam were shared by the Post itself. I know that, because I personally wrote many of the Post’s foundational editorials on Islam from 1999 to 2001, when the newspaper’s editorial direction was set. And even after I left, I continued as a guest columnist. I’ve written more than one hundred columns about Islam for the Post and other Postmedia newspapers, and I continued to do so even after I started The Rebel.

That’s just me; Daniel Pipes, the president of the Middle East Forum – that one the Post now calls “right wing” and “hostile” – has written 160 columns for the Post, all of them about Islam.

Being critical of political Islam – and supporting progressive Muslims, as The Rebel does – used to be a core editorial position of the Post. When did that change?

Warnica goes to great lengths to hang the alleged disgrace of my views around the necks of the Conservative Party of Canada. He writes, “those who are backing away — including some with ties to the highest reaches of the Conservative Party — will eventually have to answer the question, why now? Why wasn’t everything else the site has ever done — the fear mongering, the focus on Muslims, the footsie with white nationalist themes — enough?”

It’s true, I’ve supported the Conservatives, even volunteering for the party in the 2008 election. But my work for them did not touch on Islam; and in any event, I stopped working with them in 2011. My main expression has been through Postmedia, including more than 600 columns over the years in the Sun newspapers and over 100 op-eds in the National Post itself, the last one less than a year ago. I was part of the Post’s extended family.

The feeling was mutual – half a dozen Postmedia writers regularly appeared on Rebel shows. Our most frequent guest told us he was ordered by his Sun newspaper editor to quit us.

Why is the National Post throwing away nearly 20 years of principled opposition to political Islam? Like Captain Renault in Casablanca, why is it pretending to be shocked, shocked that conservatives believe in the separation of mosque and state?

If the Post can indulge in a baseless conspiracy theory that this is all because The Rebel is secretly owned by some anti-Islam tycoon (we’re not – we’re 100% owned by staff, and no single donor has given us more than 2% of our funds), then perhaps I can simply repeat what I have read in the Post itself: that for the past 18 months, Postmedia management has been lobbying for major financial assistance from Justin Trudeau.

Abandoning two decades of editorial principle and attacking The Rebel would surely please Trudeau. But that’s probably just another one of my “extreme, far-right” theories.